As technology advances, the number of individuals using mobile computing devices steadily increases. The mobile computing devices allow users to communicate or connect with others via telephone calls or electronic messaging, such as SMS text messaging, Instant Messaging, email, and messaging through various social networking sites. Due to high volumes of users and frequent use, individuals can become inundated with electronic messages, such that reviewing all the messages requires longs periods of time. Additionally, large amounts of messages may result in users deleting unread messages to save time or inadvertently skipping important messages.
Finding large chunks of time throughout the day to carefully review all messages can be challenging. For example, a student may only have a few minutes between classes to check his or her phone and is unable to check all received messages. Being able to identify the most important messages for review would allow the student to view the important messages in a more timely manner than the messages that are less important. Further, when driving, individuals have a very limited time window to check their messages, such as at a red light. If the driver was able to identify a message that was very important, he may be able to view the message at the red light before the light turns green.
Current methods exist for prioritizing messages within a particular communication channel or social networking application. For example, users are able to flag an email message as having high importance so that the intended recipient understands the importance of the message. However, an email message marked as important by a sender may not be important to the recipient. Further, the ability to flag messages is only available for messages within a particular email application, not other types of messages, such as social networking posts or SMS text messages.
Therefore, there is a need for prioritizing messages and providing the most important messages to a recipient for review, especially during limited time periods for review. Preferably, the data prioritization considers a sender of the message, a content of the message, and a length of the message.